


Ghost Writer

by kittydesade



Category: Thunderheart (1992)
Genre: Chromatic Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 03:37:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of the movie, Walter finds something he thinks Ray ought to have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Writer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecarlysutra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/gifts).



Maggie had a dream one night, when she was a little girl after her first _inipi_ ceremony. Not her first in the lodge, she wasn't allowed in yet, but she was allowed to tend the fire and assist her father and Grandpa Reaches in conducting the ceremony, and some of the dreams crept into her head, she thought. They were true dreams. They had the right shape for it.

As a young woman, Maggie looked out at the reservation and decided these dreams meant that she was destined to help her people. Or intended to, in some way; it was a nudge to bring her out of the reservation and to the white people to learn what they had to teach her, and to teach them in return. To bring her to other places and learn and share that knowledge, because wasn't that what the river did? It flowed. Always in motion. So she had to always be in motion, never sit still. She explained away her restlessness as being a daughter of the river, until she was sixteen and too stubborn, too old to believe in her own words. And then she was twenty and too bitter, too jaded, and then she was twenty three and too tired to believe in her own ability to change the world.

When she uncovered the secret of the river, she thought of that dream. Flowing along with it, following it to the source. She went out there, and barely had time to turn and dig her feet in to spring off and away before the shots knocked her down and into the muck, tainted water, tainted source. She still wasn't sure she understood.

  


  


  


Ray got the package at his desk in DC one afternoon, a couple of months after the incident on the rez. He kept in touch with Crow Horse with a phone call once a week, sometimes twice, but they didn't have much to say. The kinds of things he wanted to say seemed to always die in his mouth. Not the kinds of things he wanted to say over the phone.

Besides, after what happened with Coutelle he had a pretty good idea his phone was tapped, anyway.

They weren't reading his mail yet. And Crow Horse had either the good sense or the paranoia to post it from a nearby town instead of the reservation itself. The package was about the size of a school textbook, though not so heavy. He had no idea what was going on. Maybe it was a watch or something.

Maybe it was another rock. Heh.

He waited till he got home to open the package, stuffing it in his bag and doing his best to forget about it so no one would ask awkward questions he didn't feel comfortable answering. And then when he got home he sat at the kitchen counter and opened it, and books fell out. Cheap books, the kind you could get at any bookstore, blank journals. The yellow light from his dusty kitchen bulb made them look older and more faded than they were.

"What the hell, Walter," he muttered to himself, smiling a little. He opened the first one and began to read.

Around the middle of the first book he grabbed a beer from the fridge, no longer smiling. Ray sat, read through every page, sliding his fingers over the yellowed paper and the changing handwriting. Evolving handwriting, he thought. The handwriting evolved as she had evolved.

By the third book he had a third beer in hand, and it was one in the morning and he hadn't stopped reading. Somewhere in there he decided to call in sick the next day, but he didn't want to stop reading. The last entry of all of them was dated back to a few months ago, and Ray put down the bottle. Carefully, because if he didn't he was going to throw it into the wall.

Then he put his head down on the counter, laced his fingers behind his neck and against his short-cropped, puppy-soft hair, and cried until he screamed.

At two thirty-five in the morning he called Crow Horse. "Hey." He still didn't have his voice together, dragging his sleeve under his nose rather than leaving the kitchen for the box of Kleenex.

"You got the package." Crow Horse didn't even sound half asleep.

"Wind tell you that?" Ray flopped back into his chair then got up again to pace the length of the phone cord. "Yeah, I got the package."

Crow Horse chuckled, not rising to the bait. "Found those when we were cleaning out her place. Didn't have time to give them to you before we left, but I figured..." He let it trail off, and Ray could picture him giving one of those shrugs that encompassed everything, spirits, chance, fate, some great Lakota beast in the sky. Every possible reason from the mundane to the magical.

Ray had found that annoying, once. Now it was just part of what made Walter, Walter. "Thanks."

"No sweat." Silence. The quiet was greater in the kitchen when he had Crow Horse on the phone, somehow. Maybe the contrast, knowing he had someone to talk to, a reason to break the silence, but he couldn't think of anything to say. "You okay?"

He scrubbed a hand over his forehead, thumb and forefinger pinching on either side of his eyebrows. He didn't know how to answer that right now. "Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I will be." That was more truthful than the other one.

"Yeah, you will." Crow Horse's voice had that little lift at the end; Ray could picture him, nodding, his head half cocked up in that judging expression where he looked him over and decided Ray would do. He still didn't know what Crow Horse thought he was supposed to do. "You take care of yourself, okay? She woulda wanted that."

He hung up before Ray could pull himself together enough to say anything.

The bed was cold and unmade and smelled of not having slept in it for a while, what with the whole stakeouts thing for the past few nights. And Ray was drunk, not too drunk, but three beers was enough to keep him from wanting to do more than shuck off his pants and his shoes and pass out face first into the pillows.

The bed tilted sideways when he dreamed, rolled him off and into the air and he was flying, and he thought how flying dreams were supposed to mean something about sex, sexuality, having sexy dreams, but he couldn't remember what. Dreams were all tied up with sex in psychology, weren't they? Freud said.

Maggie was there. She met him by the river once he stopped flying, only this time the river had some kind of sparkle to it. Like an elementary school's worth of kids had taken all their glitter bottles and hung upside down over the river and given them a good shake. He looked over the river and shook his head, and she smiled.

"What?"

He looked over at her. "It's all... shiny." Ray frowned. Something wasn't right about this.

"I know. That's because you made them stop test-drilling. You busted their little network. It's going to be okay now."

Test-drilling for uranium. Ray remembered what was bugging him. "You can't be here..."

"Why not?" she laughed.

"Um. You're, uh. Dead?"

Maggie gave him a look, that look that said _oh, wasichu._ "What does that have to do with anything."

Really, what? He didn't know. His logical argument had just been refuted by the fact that the dead person wanted to know what her being dead had to do with anything, and Ray gave it up before he got started.

"Come on," she said, cocking her head downriver and extending her hand to him. "Let's go for a walk."

He took her hand. Her palm was cool and soft and just yielding enough for him to feel the strength in her grip. Not at all like a dead person's. They walked, and she didn't say anything and neither did he. It didn't feel like they needed to say anything at all.


End file.
